Newsflashes: relevance, directness, conciseness

[grahamperrin]

Summary

For each RELEASE: prune its pre-release points in time. Appetites for historic dates are sated elsewhere, at pages such as:

• https://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.3R/schedule/
• the schedule at https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.4R/
• and so on.

Think beyond the newsflashes page itself. With no more than six flashes represented at the FreeBSD Project home page, timely pruning will significantly improve first impressions of this area of the page. For posterity (captured today) – three of six flashes are redundant:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20221220144528/https://www.freebsd.org/.

Improved the preamble (the text that precedes dated flashes), partly by moving GNOME- and KDE-related texts to the News page.

Origin of diff 2 here:

• https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-doc/compare/main...grahamperrin:freebsd-doc:newsflash.diff.

Test Plan

News preview in GitHub:

• https://github.com/grahamperrin/freebsd-doc/blob/newsflash/website/content/en/news/_index.adoc.

Newsflash preamble preview in GitHub:

• https://github.com/grahamperrin/freebsd-doc/blob/newsflash/website/content/en/news/newsflash.adoc.

[grahamperrin]

Update from GitHub.

[lwhsu]

Removing pre-release items seems too overkill to me. That newsflash page also serves as a timeline of the project. If that page grows too long, we can make it into pages like events. I think the problem is not 3 of 6 items are this kind of message, on the other hand, it's all the news in the past 3 months. I suggest we should encourage to announce more impacting news in the project.

[pauamma_gundo.com]

In D37860#860175, @lwhsu wrote:

Removing pre-release items seems too overkill to me. That newsflash page also serves as a timeline of the project.

Agreed. (I hear from historians that "people considered this worth recording at the time" is often as important as "this happened then" for historical context.)

[grahamperrin]

In D37860#860175, @lwhsu wrote:

Removing pre-release items seems too overkill to me. That newsflash page also serves as a timeline of the project.

RELEASE-related flashes (high interest) are good to keep.

Having so many redundant items results in a timeline that is … the first word that came to mind is turgid, but that's not quite right. It's just dull; an excess of low-interest irrelevance. Disinteresting, not news-like.

If that page grows too long, we can make it into pages like events.

-1

I suggest we should encourage to announce more impacting news in the project.

+1, however that's out of scope of this revision.

[grahamperrin]

In D37860#860175, @lwhsu wrote:

𡀦… timeline of the project. …

https://freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd/timeline/ is lovely, albeit outdated.

Imagine: adding everything that's pruned above as an additional point on the timeline that's presented by the Foundation. It would wreck it.

[grahamperrin]

Deadwood in, Perrin out, so long and fanks for all the thish.